Are you warm and fuzzy?

The other day I was writing an email to a business group that I belong to and I wondered, once again, how do I come across to people? I know how unintentionally misleading emails, or IMs or even a chat can be. You think you know someone from what you read in their emails or on forums but when you meet them they can be really different. And other times, they’re exactly like you expected.

But that’s not really what I’m talking about. You see, someone had written to the list asking for help and feedback on something that was very frustrating for them. My response was to give that help. It wasn’t anything that really asked for an opinion but more like, ‘who would you recommend’and why?’ So that’s what I did. After I sent it I noticed that someone else responded more along the lines of ‘I’m so sorry you have to deal with that.’ And I thought, how cold am I? You’d never believe that I have an advance degree in counseling by the straightforward, matter-of-fact, problem solving answer I gave, void of any compassion at all. That got me to wondering, and I don’t know if I really want to know the answer, but, how do I come across? I think I can come across a lot different than I am. It’s my age-old issue of caring too much about what people think.